“We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied together into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly … We aren’t going to have peace on Earth until we recognize the basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality.” - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

About a week ago, I showed up for an event that was touted by Portland’s NAACP chapter as “An Interreligious Dialogue” in honor of the upcoming Martin Luther King holiday. Given Maine’s increasing ethnic and religious diversity, it sounded like a promising way to pass an evening. When I got there, though, I found a room filled almost entirely with White Anglo-Saxon Protestants over the age of 50, leaving me to wonder where, exactly, the “dialogue” part of the equation came into the picture.

Beyond the absence of any real religious diversity, I also found the total lack of youth presence curious, especially considering the fact that the event took place at the University of Southern Maine’s Glickman Library. Was this a sign that we have truly entered a “secular age,” as sociologists and nay-saying televangelists would have us believe? Or does it suggest something about younger Americans’ approach to religious commitment? Is faith, for Generations X and Y, more private? Is our tacit acceptance of religious diversity so deeply ingrained that any discussion of it would seem extraneous, artificial? Or is it just apathy that keeps younger Americans from wanting to look deeply at the issues that may divide us?

For people who reject the Religious Right’s approach to faith-in-action, there can sometimes be a forced disconnect between our religious convictions and our political and social ideals. But the issue isn’t really whether faith has any place in politics; it’s whether that faith serves as an excuse for “the faithful” to divide from and demoralize “the unfaithful,” or whether it opens us up, softens our hearts and leads us to embrace our common humanity with even those who are most different from ourselves.

As a Buddhist, I’m at a loss to find a place where my spirituality ends and my social conscience begins. In fact, Buddhism doesn’t even acknowledge divisions such as “sacred” and “secular,” “religious” and “political.” The very goal of Buddhist practice is to look through such dualities, and through the apparent divisions between oneself and others, to discover the reality of our mutual interdependence and shared destiny. How could such a realization not change the way one thinks, acts, interacts, votes, shops …

I recently read an exciting new book on this very subject, One City: A Declaration of Interdependence, by Ethan Nichtern, a young Buddhist teacher based in New York’s East Village. The book's premise is that each of us is responsible for creating the world we live in. “Our society has manifested in its present form because the people who comprise it – knowingly or not – collectively acted to make it this way,” he writes in an early chapter. While this idea isn’t exactly new, Nichtern says most us choose to live in blissful ignorance of own responsibility for the state of the world. “So often, I hear people – myself included – fall into a seductive trap in the way we discuss events and culture: we speak of the contemporary world as if we’re witnessing the unfolding of someone else’s nightmare. It’s an interesting nightmare – equipped with many compelling characters and melodramatic scenarios – but we feel personally disconnected from the plot.”

One City challenges us to go deeper than just caring about “the world,” and shares a vision for how to be accountable for the ways in which our own thoughts and actions affect that world. “I may have truly wonderful ideas about the pitfalls of American consumerism," he writes, "but have I taken the time necessary to familiarize myself with the mechanism by which my own mind craves things, moment by moment?” Nichtern’s examination doesn’t end there. He also handily disabuses readers of the notion that our generation’s mindset has evolved from that of our nation’s founders, who were somehow able to justify the horrors of colonization and slavery: “When we start to assure ourselves that our assumptions definitely depict the truth, they become fortified into bullet-pointed ideology and bullet-proof dogma … (The unexamined mind) can easily be sold lies – even by itself – and can mistakenly interpret those lies as universal truth. That’s the colonizing mentality.”

Nor can any of us wash our hands of the violence that continues to erupt around the globe, says Nichtern. “Violence is not just about the workings of some vague and massive military industrial complex, and it doesn’t always come equipped with night-vision goggles, desert tanks, high-tech rifles, or terrorists’ dirty bombs. Violence is right here in our bodies and minds, hatched from an icy glance, spiteful words, or bitter thoughts detonated quietly on inner minefields.”

Understanding the depth of our connection with our world and the others who inhabit it isn’t something that’s limited to Buddhists, though. Martin Luther King saw it. So did Thomas Merton, Albert Schweitzer, Albert Einstein and many others throughout history who intimately understood their own responsibility for the state of the world, and fearlessly sought to live in a way that acknowledged their interdependence with all beings. As we remember the life and legacy of Dr. King this week, perhaps that’s the most valuable lesson we can take away.